All designs by Deborah Astley

Description:

Collection based on my original pen drawing of two trees. One year as my anniversary “card” to my husband, we walked down to the end of our road and I showed him two trees which I had always admired. They were post oak trees, which are not the most beautiful trees, but in southwestern Oklahoma, we take what we can get. What was special about these two trees was that they were separate from the usual thicket of post oaks. When post oaks grow in a thicket, they don’t get that tall and their purpose usually consists of cattle being able to walk under the post oaks' branches so that they can brush the flies off their backs. These particular post oaks, because they were apart from the rest had grown taller and straighter, their limbs lightly touching one another, rather than in a tangled thicket of post oaks. I told my husband that those two post oaks resembled our marriage, together but separate, growing straight and tall. In the autumn, the leaves of those post oaks had bright oranges and browns and, if you are familiar with Maxfield Parrish’s art, the post oaks looked as if they had been painted by him. And I talk about the post oaks in the past tense because a couple of years later, they were chopped down in the name of progress.